Page 57 of Lady Diana's Lost Lord
“Papa would ask you,” Hannah said, wrinkling her nose. “Probably.”
Ben cleared his throat from the doorway, startling both of them. “I wouldn’t,” he said to Hannah. “But only because I am a very poor dancer, and I’d be horribly afraid that I might step on her toes by accident.”
Hannah muffled a giggle in her hands as she flopped onto her back. “Papa, you’re supposed to knock.”
Dutifully, Ben rapped upon the door frame with his knuckles and asked, “May I come in?” He didn’t wait for an invitation. Instead he stepped around Diana’s scattered belongings which littered the floor and scooped Hannah up from the bed, slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Probably his effortless handling of the squirming little girl was a matter of years of practice, but there was something undeniably charming in it. Hannah kicked her feet and shrieked with laughter as Ben banded her about the knees with one arm to keep her secured against his shoulder.
“Apologies,” he said to Diana, swinging back toward the door. “It’s well past her bedtime.” He paused near the threshold, turning once more—anexaggerated motion that Diana was certain had been made to elicit another chorus of giggles. “Well?” he asked, with a jerk of his head toward the door.
Oh. Oh, of course. Diana clambered off the bed and trailed along behind them. Striding through Hannah’s bedroom door, Ben swung the child down from his arms with a mighty heave, and she landed upon the mattress with a pronouncedthumpthat set off another burst of laughter.
They were going to be just fine, the two of them, she thought as she slipped into the room after them and silently pressed the door closed behind her. Hannah would never be confined to only a nursery with an indifferent governess. She would never have her knuckles rapped if she failed to write her letters flawlessly, or be reduced to begging scraps of attention from an absent parent.
Ben would tuck her into her bed every night, right up until she deemed herself too grown for such things, too old to need her father to chase away the monsters lurking in the shadows beneath her bed, too mature for anything so childish as fairy stories told in wondrous, hushed voices. And then, probably, he would mourn the loss of it, because he would miss the child she had once been.
He dropped into the chair beside Hannah’s bed, the legs of it creaking beneath his weight. “Come, now,” he said, as he patted her pillow with one hand, waiting until she plopped her head upon it to drape the quilt over her shoulders. “Time for bed.”
Hannah stretched out her hand to Diana, wiggling her fingers expectantly as she buried a massive yawn into the downy fluff of the pillow beneath her head. Diana managed to claim a sliver of the bed to sit upon, and slipped her hand into Hannah’s, relishing the tight grip of the child’s fingers around her own.
Unearthing the book of nursery rhymes from where it had been stuffed beneath Hannah’s pillow, Ben began to read from it in a low, soothing voice, and Diana let her fingers drift over Hannah’s forehead, smoothing away the tiny, flyaway hairs. Slowly—a minute at a time, with the soft drone of Ben’s voice—the fingers gripping her own went slack.
Hannah gave a tiny, snuffling snore, and then there was only the hiss and sputter of the candle upon the nightstand.
“She loves this book, you know,” Ben said. Hannah didn’t so much as twitch at the advent of sound, already dead asleep. “She’s got it memorized backwards and forwards. But she always wants me to read from it.”
“Of course you must take it with you,” Diana said, stroking her thumb across the back of Hannah’s hand in her own.
Ben sighed, thumbing through the ancient pages. “Probably it won’t survive the journey,” he said, indicating the places where small tears had begun to pull the pages free of the spine. His voice lowered to a murmur. “She’s going to be devastated.”
Her heart ached at the realization that he was not speaking only of thebook. “Children are resilient,” she said softly. “She’ll recover. But wherever you go—make certain there is a circulating library. Books are so dear, and Hannah should have a proper education.” A better one than she had managed in the weeks she had had to work with, though probably she had established a decent foundation. “She’s still struggling with her maths. Particularly the division.”
Ben managed a half-hearted smile. “I won’t be so careless with her education in the future,” he said. “I promise you that.”
No; she knew he would not. But then, he would soon have the ability to buy himself the time to dedicate to it, which he had never had before. “She should have a proper tutor,” she said, and heard the raspy inflection to her voice. “Because she is so bright, so clever. That must be nurtured.”
“She’ll have that,” Ben said. “She’ll have everything I can give her.” Balancing the book on his knee, he reached out and tucked Hannah’s quilt closer about her. “We’ve struggled together, both of us. She’s always deserved a better life than this, and it has taken me so long to give it to her. I’ve missed too much of her childhood already.”
Because he had had to work so very hard to support them. No one could fault him for his care of his daughter, not when he had cast off a life of ease for one of constant labor to do it. “There’s still time,” she said. “And do you know, Ben, when she is grown and she looks back upon her childhood, she’s not going to wish that she had had more toys, or more pretty dresses, or strawberry trifle every night for dessert. She’s only going to think of how lucky she was to have a father who loved her so dearly.”
A rueful chuckle left his lips, and he swiped the heel of his hand over his eyes, which had begun to glitter alarmingly in the candlelight. “Well, thereisthat,” he said. “Probably she’ll end up a bit spoiled.”
“You can’t spoil a child with love,” she said, and gently laid Hannah’s hand down upon the pillow as she rose once more to her feet. “Things, yes. But love? There’s no such thing as too much of it.”
Ben bent to kiss Hannah’s forehead and snuffed the candle with the tips of his fingers, plunging the room into darkness. As he followed her out into the hallway and closed the door behind them, he pulled her into the circle of his arms and pressed a kiss to her temple. “One more tomorrow,” he said, in a quiet rumble, his arms winding around her so tightly she feared that the imprint of them would be scored forever beneath the surface of her skin. “What do you say?”
She said yes. However many tomorrows he had to offer, she would takethem—and take them—and take them—until he hadn’t anymore left to give.
∞∞∞
Halfway through Ben’s ride home the following day, the clouds that had begun to muddle up the sky some hours earlier turned a nasty grey and poured down rain. Fitting, he’d thought, since he’d felt rather grey himself ever since he had finally opened up the graphite vein he’d spent months searching for.
He ought to have been thrilled. He had workedfor it, after all—he’d bled and sweated and toiled and sufferedfor exactly this. His gamble had paid off beyond his expectations, beyond even his hopes. Once that rock had crumbled away, he’d freed enough graphite from the mine to see himself and Hannah both set for the rest of their lives. Modest lives, perhaps, but it would see them safe and comfortable.
But would it see them happy?Couldit see them happy, without Diana?
The rain that pelted his face felt more and more like tears with each passing second. His chest ached as if it had been scraped raw from the inside, and it wasn’t the strain from the day’s labors that shortened his breath to pathetic little wheezes.
